From the Card Index of Albanianisms in Secret Balkan Languages: Morphological Adaptation and Word Formation

Abstract

Albanian loans in Bulgarian and Macedonian historical-recorded secret varieties used by craftsmen often show a characteristic distribution: a) in a secret language specific for a certain traditional handicraft, and b) historically attested with a main focus on a certain area, in most cases in South-Western Bulgaria and in Macedonia (see map 1, p. 143). Generally spoken, the lexico-semantic system of the Bulgarian and Macedonian secret languages was free from any narrow-bound professional specialization, and at times functioned as an open system in oral communication. Loans have been made from Greek, Turkish, Romani and Albanian, and then these loans have been morphologically adapted in accordance to the grammatical category of the corresponding Bulgarian word and in accordance to the common word-formation regularities. Semantic Calques in brick layers’ secret language can be seen as a result of an intense Albanian-Bulgarian symbiosis on a linguistic level.
This is demonstrated in the example of eighteen Bulgarian/Macedonian secret language verbs and five nouns – designations for persons, often having as etymon a dialectal and/or archaic Albanian word.